On February 26, we are privileged to have Gary Yourofsky, PETA's national lecturer, coming to campus to speak on veganism and animal rights. Yourofsky is a long time animal rights activist who has dedicated his life to fighting for the animals. He will be doing a school-wide auditorium lecture at 7:30 PM in Physics 131 and is also interested in doing individual classroom lectures.
If you know of any professors who may be interested in having him speak as a
guest lecturer in the classroom, please contact SOAR at soar@soar-mn.org, leave a message at
612-624-0422, or mail us at:
Student Organization for Animal Rights
Room
226-A CMU
300 Washington Ave. SE
Minneapolis, MN 55455
Source: http://www.soar-mn.org
Courtesy: JJD
Feb. 22--The Humane Society of the United States this week
implored Agriculture Secretary Ann Veneman to aggressively stop the interstate
movement of fighting birds to prevent the spread of exotic Newcastle disease.
A letter to Veneman dated Thursday alleged that the USDA has not
properly enforced an existing federal law against shipment of birds between
states that are bound for cockfighting derbies, a sport that animal-rights
groups have long opposed as cruel. "We are not aware of any federal enforcement cases against
cockfighters for violations of the interstate prohibitions that have been in
place since 1976," said the letter signed by HSUS Senior Vice President Wayne
Pacelle. USDA spokesman Jerry Redding said he could not immediately
respond to the Humane Society's complaints and allegations. "The process of
responding to a letter of this nature can be very time-consuming," he said,
because of the research required. Meanwhile, exotic Newcastle disease continued to take its toll
in Southern California. Authorities on Friday reported that an eighth San
Bernardino County egg farm housing 145,000 hens has been diagnosed with the
highly infectious virus. That brings to more than 3 million the estimated number of hens
that have been slaughtered or are scheduled to be euthanized as part of an
effort to stamp out the disease. That represents 25 percent of Southern
California's egg-laying hen population, estimated at 12 million. The Humane Society contends that the threat of exotic Newcastle
disease should spur a national crackdown on cockfighting. "What we need is a commitment from our leadership at the USDA to
vigorously enforce the federal law," Pacelle said in an interview Friday.
Pacelle said a federal law to prevent the interstate shipment of
game fowl for cockfighting has been toughened. Starting in May, he said, such
birds will be prohibited from being sent to the two states -- New Mexico and
Louisiana -- where cockfighting is still legal or to foreign countries where the
sport is allowed. In the letter to Veneman, Pacelle complained that the lack of
arrests under interstate shipping law "is a particularly noteworthy failure
given the widespread and well-known illegal commerce in fighting birds that
routinely occurs and is sometimes even advertised in cockfighting magazines such
as The Gamecock and The Feathered Warrior." Pacelle said, "It now appears,
although there is no definitive confirmation at this time, that the initial
outbreak of (exotic Newcastle disease) originated with fighting birds." He also
observed: "The transportation of live birds for fighting poses a major risk of
transmission." Redding said he was uncertain whether the USDA had taken any
enforcement actions against interstate shipments of birds for cockfighting,
which is an illegal activity under Section 26 of the federal Animal Welfare Act.
However, he said, the letter appeared to unfairly fault the USDA
for not stopping cockfighting. He said the states, not the federal government,
have passed anti-cockfighting laws that they are responsible for enforcing.
Redding also said it is not known whether the outbreak of exotic
Newcastle disease began in fighting cocks. "We are still doing the trace-back,"
he said. Redding said the mission of the joint federal and state task
force fighting exotic Newcastle disease in California is not law enforcement.
"Our job is to eradicate the disease. Our job is not to punish
people who may or may not have violated state statutes," he said. Under an exotic Newcastle disease quarantine imposed by the
USDA, owners of backyard birds, including those of the cockfighting variety,
cannot legally move them beyond the boundaries of eight Southern California
counties. Eradication task force representatives said the game fowl
industry has been cooperating with the task force by requesting that their
members comply with the quarantine. The task force has acknowledged that in the door-to-door search
for sick birds, agricultural authorities have been surprised by the scope of the
game fowl industry in Southern California. So far, about 35 percent of the
backyard flocks that have tested positive for exotic Newcastle disease or have
been exposed have been predominantly game fowl, the task force said. In California, it is not against the law to own or breed game
fowl. However, it is a crime to possess birds or train them with the intent of
fighting them or to be a spectator at a cockfight. Pacelle said that although USDA officials cannot enforce state
laws against cockfighting, they would discover by attending such events that
many participants have out-of-state driver licenses, showing that they have
brought their birds across state lines. Rep. Robert E. Andrews, D- N.J., said Friday he has introduced
legislation that would make cockfighting a federal crime. "I think we need it to be a federal felony to sponsor or
participate in cockfighting, because I think it is an inhumane practice that now
apparently is related to the spread of disease," said Andrews. "Often local
prosecutors don't have the resources and sometimes the will to follow up on the
problem." ------------------- To see more of The Press-Enterprise, or to subscribe to the newspaper, go to
http://www.PE.com © 2003, The Press-Enterprise, Riverside, Calif. Distributed by Knight
Ridder/Tribune Business News.
It's legal in Louisiana, yet it's underground.
A cockfighter in Vinton declined to talk for this story. Some in Iowa and Bridge City, Texas, didn't return phone calls. Those who agreed to be interviewed did so reluctantly. They said the media treats them unfairly.
Those involved with cockfighting said a Vinton motel gets so much business when the nearby Bayou Club has weekend events that it bases its hiring on the cockfighting season. The motel manager declined to confirm this or speak to a reporter, even with the offer that her name and the business name not be mentioned.
A food vendor said his sales to Vinton motels, stores and restaurants are highest when fowl are fighting. He didn't want his name or company name mentioned.
Anyone can enter the Bayou Club to watch the action, yet cameras and video recorders are prohibited.
U.S. Rep. Chris John, D-La., went on record two years ago against federal legislation that will make it a crime in three months to cross into Louisiana with gamecocks.
"This is a multimillion-dollar industry," John told The Associated Press. "It's a family-type of business."
Two weeks ago, John's spokesman Alisha Prather said the congressman "is not defending the industry. He has defended the right of the state to decide whether to allow it. Do you see the difference?"
Cockfighting is a match between two roosters. They attack each other until one dies. One of the top cockpits in Louisiana is the Bayou Club. It's near the Toomey/Starks exit on I-10, the nearest exit to Texas.
The Bayou Club is in the building that housed the former Club F/X, a nightclub that boomed when it was still legal in Louisiana to drink at 18. When the age was raised to 21 in 1995 and there was no longer a lure for Texans, the club scene died near the state line.
Mark Johnson, a third-generation cockfighter, moved from South Carolina to Louisiana 12 years ago to fight chickens legally. Louisiana and New Mexico remain the last two states where it's legal.
Johnson opened the Bayou Club five years ago with partners who don't want their names mentioned.
The club's season runs all year except mid-August through October. Most fights are on Saturdays, all day. Johnson said the attendance ranges from 300 to 1,000.
On a Saturday last month, the parking lot was filled with Texas license plates. Many inside wore camo and cowboy hats. A significant number in attendance were Hispanic. Many signs inside are in Spanish as well as English.
A first-time attendee pays $45 to see the fights. Admission is $20, a membership in the Bayou Club is $5, and a membership in the Louisiana Gamefowl Breeders Association is $20.
Stadium seating surrounds the pit on all four sides. The 30-by-20 pit is 4 feet above the floor. Roosters fight on dirt, separated from the crowd by glass and wire.
Red, white and blue bunting hangs on the walls. The national anthem is played before the fights. The American flag hangs in the arena along with the flags of Mexico and the Philippines, big cockfighting countries.
Johnson said people have come to his club from around America. He's entertained folks from Japan, senators from the Philippines and the vice president of Panama. Champion boxer Roy Jones Jr. has a reserved seat for the season.
Johnson expected Jones' family at the Bayou Club this weekend for a big three-day derby. Jones wasn't expected be there, as he is training for a March 1 fight in Las Vegas.
Roosters are weighed before fights. They must be within 2 ounces of each other to compete. Gaffs (picks) or knives close to an inch long are attached to their legs. To gain an advantage, owners give stimulants to the fowl.
People pay $100-$500 in entry fees to fight their birds. The money goes into a pot, and the winner takes it.
While there are big winners, raising gamefowl is a labor of love, not a way to get rich. Chip and Shirley Baker of Iota spend at least $15,000 a year to raise 150 roosters on their 3.5 acres. They said they break even in good years.
There's gambling at cockfights. Johnson said his club does not sponsor it. Rather, people in attendance bet each other on the outcome of the fights.
Fowl that lose at the Bayou Club are recycled. Feathers are used for trout flies. Alligator farms take the carcasses.
New law
The federal Farm Bill, signed into law last year, takes effect May 14. Anyone who takes gamecocks across a state line can be fined up to $15,000 and/or imprisoned up to a year.
If the provision remains, it will hurt an industry that makes a nine-figure annual impact on the state, according to a survey conducted in 2000-01 by the Louisiana Gamefowl Breeders Association.
The survey noted nearly 20,000 fighting roosters in the state and 2,750 breeders. Accounting for the value of the chickens and how much it costs to raise them, the economic impact was figured at more than $205 million a year.
Those who raise and fight gamefowl hired one of Louisiana's top lobbyists, Randy Haynie, to protect their interests. Haynie's name is listed with the Louisiana Gamefowl Breeders Association in state records available online.
Bayou Club manager Mark Johnson is director of the state Gamefowl Breeders Association and the vice president of the national organization. He raises 400 roosters on farms in Ragley and Starks. He buys 2,000 pounds of feed every 10 days. His earnings from winning roosters and the Bayou Club enable him to support Vinton High football, Little League Baseball, Boy Scouts, Girl Scouts and police fund-raisers.
He's part of a culture that was around six centuries before Christ, when Greeks fought roosters. In America, Presidents Washington, Jefferson, Jackson and Lincoln took part in cockfighting.
Today, illegal events take place in states where the sport is against the law. Johnson said he knows 50-100 others like himself who moved to Louisiana or nearby so they could take part legally.
In 1982, the section of Louisiana law marked "cruelty to animals" was modified to state, "For purposes of this Section, fowl shall not be defined as animals." A 1997 anti-cockfighting bill never made it past committee in the state Legislature. The next year, an amendment to ban reached the floor of the state Senate. It was defeated 22-5.
In the Bayou State, the Bayou Club is among the four largest cockpits. The others are in similarly rural areas in Acadiana (Sunset), near New Orleans (Pearl River) and in the northwest corner of the state (Vivian). Smaller pits are scattered around the state.
People come from around the world to buy roosters raised in Louisiana. Filipinos travel to the Bakers' home in Iota to check out a bloodline of black fowl that dates back to 1870.
Chip Baker moved to Louisiana 15 years ago from Florida so he wouldn't have to drive so far to compete. He settled in Iota to live between the pits in Vinton and Sunset.
Baker is a former longshoreman, now on disability retirement. Raising fowl is a family business. As his wife Shirley gets the children ready for school, Chip checks the pens in the yard to see if any chickens got loose in the night.
After the children go to school, the couple gives water to the birds.
"Each has an individual drinking container," Chip Baker said. "They have to be scrubbed out and vitamins have to be put in."
Their 10-year-old son and 8-year-old daughter raise and fight their own roosters. The son got his picture in Grit and Steel, a national gamefowl publication, for winning a derby.
Chip Baker said, "It's something we can all do together."
Every egg is marked in the incubator. Lineage of successful fighters is noted.
"Breeding for gamefowl these days is basically genetic engineering," Chip Baker said. His bloodline began after the Civil War. The roosters were bred in Kentucky and Tennessee, with the tradition upheld by Baker's grandfather and father.
The Bakers take exception to those who say that cockfighters are brutes who don't care about the birds. The family spends at least six hours a day on their roosters. They give them names such as Pretty Boy, Oscar, Cash, White Lightning, Big Man and Godzilla.
Shirley Baker said, "We've had some that have gotten so old that they went blind and got arthritis. I go out there twice a day, hand-feed them and hand-water them.
"I become attached to all of them, but I understand what they are for. They don't know anything else. If you turned them all loose right now, they'd kill each other."
Opponents
The Humane Society of the United States says "while birds will often fight over food, territory or mates, such fights generally take place only to establish dominance. These fights seldom result in serious injury.
"In cockfights, by contrast, the birds cannot escape and are essentially forced to fight until a winner is declared. There is nothing natural or normal about the stimulants, metal knives and gaffs ... Nor is it natural to breed birds for maximum aggressiveness."
The Web site LouisianaAgainstCockfighting.org was created two years ago in part by Dr. James Riopelle, a New Orleans anesthesiologist and vegetarian.
He was among more than 20 others who protested outside the Sunset cockpit in the mid-1990s. Riopelle said they brought members of the Louisiana Philharmonic Orchestra and LSU's Golden Band from Tigerland to play anti-cockfighting songs, but the police didn't allow them to play.
Riopelle is the past president of the Coalition of Louisiana Animal Advocates, a group that numbers around 70. New Orleans high school teacher Pinckney Wood is the current president.
Wood has been an animal-rights activist for more than 20 years.
He spent summers in Wyoming, where he fought against elk hunting in Grand Teton National Park. In New Orleans, he continues to try to protect carriage horses and mules from oppressive heat and unsafe stalls.
Regarding cockfighting, Wood said, "To deliberately cause suffering and death to any creature for the purpose of amusement is exceedingly cruel and is offensive to the sensibilities of any moral person."
He reasoned that Louisiana has laws against dogfighting; why not cockfighting?
Proponents
Cockfighters say that many of their opponents are city residents who don't understand rural life. Chip Baker said, "Most of the people who fight gamefowl have been raised in an agricultural community, and so have their parents.
"And in these agricultural communities — which our country was based on — the people base not only their livelihood, but derive their recreation from the agricultural environment around them. This is what cockfighting is." He compared it to rodeo, hunting, trapping and fishing.
Lake Charles restaurant owner Darrell DeRouen, an avid cockfighting fan, said it's as much a part of Cajun culture as jambalaya and beer.
He denounced the hypocrisy of those who rail against cockfighting, but will then eat veal, which is made from calves "that are tied up where they can't move, kept in the dark, taken away from their mothers, made to stand in their own feces this deep for months, then killed because they make good meat."
DeRouen said it's a matter of freedom. "All we want is the right to be left alone to choose to do it. We don't push this on anybody."
Bayou Club manager Mark Johnson agreed.
"I'm not asking you to agree with what I do," he said. "All I'm asking is that you show the respect that I have a right to do it.
"I shouldn't be here having to defend who I am or what I do." He collects stories on animal rights activists and said reporters should cast the glare on them.
Johnson said if the Farm Bill kills the legal cockfighting industry in Louisiana, then it will continue illegally in the state.
He argued that the money that is raised through the Gamefowl Breeders Association will dry up and not allow breeders to combat chicken illnesses such as Exotic Newcastle Disease. Newcastle has caused more than 1 million fowl in the western United States to be slaughtered.
Source: http://www.americanpress.com/news/docs/news03.shtml
Feb. 21--SALEM, Ore.--Police and animal-rights groups
teamed up Thursday to urge lawmakers to crack down on cockfighting, reviving an
effort that fell short two years ago. Calling it a cruel blood sport and a barbaric
activity, advocates of House Bill 2086 told the House Judiciary Committee that
although Oregon already bans cockfighting, the law needs to be tightened. A
loophole allows people to raise birds for such activities by claiming the
gamecocks are being reared for fighting elsewhere. But poultry breeders and an out-of-state expert said
the bill was poorly drafted and would treat as criminals people who are raising
game fowl for legitimate purposes, such as meat or feather production.
Advocates for the bill said that despite the defeat
of a similar measure in the 2001 session, an upcoming change in federal law
makes a stronger case this time around. The amendment to the U.S. Animal Welfare
Act, which was signed by President Bush and takes effect in May, bans the
interstate transport of birds used for cockfighting. Kelly Peterson, a lobbyist for the Humane Society of
the United States, said that undermines the game fowl industry's main argument
in the past: that they have a legal right to raise fighting birds, so long as
they don't actually fight in Oregon, where the practice is illegal. "So there's no reason for any Oregonian to possess or
breed fighting birds in Oregon, unless they're being used for illicit purposes,"
she said. Cockfighting remains legal in two states, Louisiana
and New Mexico, and other countries such as Mexico and the Philippines.
The bill was decried by game fowl breeders and the
Oregon Farm Bureau as an attack on the entire poultry industry. Many of the bill's opponents cited the inherent
tendency of all poultry to fight. Barry Bushue, president of the bureau, said his son
raises Rhode Island red chickens. He questioned whether police would come to
arrest his boy if his roosters or hens were caught fighting. Mike Baker, a Dorena resident who raises game fowl,
said he doesn't use them in illegal fights. He told lawmakers the game-fowl
industry is developing special boxing gloves with electronic sensors to be
placed on the fighting birds' feet. The sensors could determine which of two
birds hits harder, and ultimately which should be declared the winner. The
format, he said, eliminates the razor-sharp gaffes and spurs worn by the birds
-- and thereby addresses concerns of animal cruelty. Baker said tightening the laws would prevent him and
other enthusiasts from developing such an alternative version of cockfighting --
something he said was protected by his constitutional right to the pursuit of
happiness. "I feel my human rights are being sacrificed for
animal rights," he said. "Come on people, this is only a chicken." While Lane County authorities say there have been few
arrests associated with cockfighting in the area, cockfighting does go on.
Last week, a husband and wife were sentenced to short
jail terms and probation on weapons charges stemming from a police raid last
summer at their home west of Junction City. The raid turned up several roosters
apparently used in cockfighting, a collection of cockfighting equipment, as well
as 48 marijuana plants. But prosecutors dropped animal cruelty and cockfighting
charges as part of the plea agreement. In 2001, police arrested a man and discovered what is
believed to be an illegal cockfighting operation outside Junction City that
included roosters, breeding hens and an indoor arena. "It's definitely prevalent in Lane County," said Mike
Wellington, program manager for the Lane County Animal Regulation Authority. "It
does happen, but due to our lack of resources, it's hard to be able to
investigate it." Woodburn police detective Jason Alexander described
finding about 100 roosters tied down on 2- to 3-foot leashes behind a house when
investigating a report last July of fighting birds, drugs and stolen property at
a rural Marion County residence. Alexander said several of the birds carried the
tell-tale signs of fighting: Many were scarred and had patches of feathers
shaved off so wounds could be treated. In addition, the birds' crests, wattles
and earlobes had been removed. This was to deny other birds something to grab
onto in order to shove into them a spur or gaffe. Francine Bradley, a professor with the University of
California, Davis, poultry sciences department, later testified that the
detective's reference to removal of a rooster's body parts as an indication it
has been used for cockfighting points to one of the bill's weakness: It is so
broadly worded that a chicken owner could be wrongly accused of raising birds
for cockfighting. She said poultry farmers commonly trim waddles, crests and ear
lobes for reasons other than preparing them for fights. Bradley said the bill's heightened penalties for
cockfighting -- up to five years in prison and fines of up to $100,000 -- would
drive hobby farmers underground. And that, she said, would make it more
difficult for disease control officials to detect and treat infections that
could spread through Oregon's poultry populations. Rep. Lane Shetterly, R-Dallas, questioned opponents'
assertions that the bill would make law-abiding poultry growers targets for
police. He said the proposed changes would be similar to Oregon's 1987 law
outlawing dog fighting. And he said the types of unintended consequences
described by opponents have never beset Oregon's law-abiding dog breeders.
------------------- To see more of The Register-Guard, Eugene, Ore., or to subscribe
to the newspaper, go to http://www.registerguard.com © 2003, The Register-Guard, Eugene, Ore. Distributed by Knight
Ridder/Tribune Business News.
Source: http://hoovnews.hoovers.com/fp.asp?layout=displaynews&doc_id=NR200302221180.3_bee800243c73d486